Fall Birch Leaf

More pretty than when all green.
I have recently found a tree in a thicket where the leaves carpeting the ground are dark slate grey they are almost heart shaped about the size of a beech leaf have never seen it before I dont know what it is.

Hmmm, it sounds very nice. I was just looking at what seems to be a choke cherry but all dark scarlet leaves carpeting the ground. The other chokecherries are just yellowing. Even at the botanical garden there were no markers to help. I hope you discover the name. I'll have a long search to go through. :-)

just beautiful..I have found the leaves this year to be so bright and so many shades of colors...I love fall..

I do too. My favoriite I think. It brings winter but I love everything returning to the earth. A beautiful phenomena as things shut down and sleep. And a quiet settles in. I thinks its wonderful.

Here is a poem that I love ..your comment here made me think of it..I hope you enjoy..~Cat

The Seven Of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

~ Marge Piercy ~


(In Praise of Fertile Land, edited by Claudia Mauro)

Ah, thank you Cat. That is beautiful! A lovely fall avatar now too. :-) I'm copying this down.

Lovely ----- thank you.

Such a perfection... the color ... the teardrop, the background...
and the poem :o)

Thank you Aleyna and Valadel.

A work of art!

Wonderful aren't they? The natives go yellow immediately but this one was planted, reluctant to go into fall. Thank you.

Stunning Gt!!! Love those colours.

Thank you Pip. I really liked it, you can just tell it tried to change color but tried a little late. :-)